‘White Famous’ considers cost of crossing over

1of2Stephen Tobolowsky (left) and Jay Pharoah in a show that explores the question of whether a black performer is only as successful as the number of whites in the audience.Photo: Michael Desmond / Michael Desmond / Showtime

“Don’t you want to be so famous that you transcend color? Obama? Tiger Woods? Will Smith before the Jada s—?”

That’s not an easy question for rising comic Floyd Mooney to answer, but if it was, there might not be a new comedy called “White Famous,” premiering on Showtime on Sunday, Oct. 15.

Jay Pharoah, late of “Saturday Night Live,” plays Mooney, who is making enough of a name for himself playing for largely black audiences that the white entertainment establishment is sniffing around.

Mooney’s agent, the slick, Harvard-educated Malcolm (Utkarsh Ambudkar), has no trouble answering the question about transcending color. As far as he’s concerned, the path to major success for his client is to get white butts in the seats, and as many and as well-padded with big wallets as possible.

Malcolm arranges a lunch meeting for Floyd with director Jason Gold (Steve Zissis) that goes really, really not well and ends with Floyd calling him a racist.

The show, produced by Jamie Foxx and created by Tom Kapinos (“Californication,” “Lucifer”), is well written, well performed, raunchy at times and unsettling at times, in a comically provocative way. Beneath the humor, which is both nonstop and often effective, “White Famous” is built on a pretty heady theme, about how much success for people of color in 2017 still depends on acceptance by white audiences. So how much of one’s own identity, if any, would an artist be willing to compromise in order to win “white fame”?

In spite of the disastrous lunch meeting, Mooney and Gold end up having to work together when Foxx, playing an exaggerated (we hope) version of himself, wants to use Mooney in his next film, which Gold will direct. There is a wardrobe issue, though, which I won’t spoil.

The show tries to do too much and isn’t always sure if it’s satire, a straight-on sitcom or an African American “Entourage.” Pharoah has a lot of heavy lifting to do, but he mostly carries it off. The commentary on what some black entertainers do for so-called crossover success is pointed and effective. I won’t name names, but “White Famous” does.

David Wiegand is an assistant managing editor and TV critic for the San Francisco Chronicle. A native of Rochester, N.Y., he holds a bachelor's degree in English and a master's in journalism from American University in Washington, D.C.

He joined The Chronicle in 1992 as a copy editor with the arts section and became entertainment editor in 1995 and executive features editor in 2006. He took on the job of television critic in 2010, writing regular TV reviews and columns not only for The Chronicle but for other papers in the Hearst chain.

Before The Chronicle, he was managing editor of Dole Newspapers in Somerville, Mass., and editor of the Amesbury (Mass.) News.